


Hug Me

by wakeupstiles



Series: 10 Days of The 100 Valentine's Day Fics 2k16 [5]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Firefighters, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Firefighter Raven, Firefighters, Heartbreak, Major character death - Freeform, Modern AU, Not Happy, Paramedic Octavia, Tragedy, Valentine's Day, blood and injuries, car crash, no valentine's cheer here, valentine's day au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 11:17:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5926498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wakeupstiles/pseuds/wakeupstiles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After that, it only took twenty more minutes for his heart to stop beating.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hug Me

**Author's Note:**

> title inspired by sweetheart candies ;; fic inspired by the grey's anatomy episode at the end of s11 where the tunnel collapsed

_Tragedy._

She knew tragedy. She knew heartbreak and loneliness and that incredible breathtaking feeling that consumed a person when someone they loved was lost—forever. Or not even someone they loved— _anyone._ Losing anyone on the job was hard. More than hard, it was nearly impossible to grasp. Grasp that they were gone. Grasp that you did _everything_ you could. Grasp that there was _nothing_ more you could have done.

There was nothing more you could have done.

Death.

It didn’t discriminate—it took anyone it pleased.

There was nothing more you could have done.

There was _nothing at all_ that you could have done.

 

* * *

   
“Reyes, where the hell is Murphy?” Lincoln barked as he entered the room, looking around trying to spot the annoying sarcastic man and grunting when he didn’t see him. The woman whom he’d asked the question to didn’t look up from her book, so he walked over to the couch she was lounging on and plucked it from her hands.

“Hey!” She snapped, making grabby hands for it.

“Hey, nice to have your attention.” He retorted, giving the book back and crossing his arms.

“What?” She scowled.

“Where’s Murphy?” He sighed.

The brunette woman shrugged, started reading again. “No idea. I’m not his keeper. Ask Emori.”

“Because I haven’t tried that already,” Her Captain muttered as he walked away from her shaking his head. After he left she took out her phone and called the man in question, though it went straight to voice mail. “Weird…” She mumbled to herself, narrowing her eyes at her phone screen. Murphy always picked up the phone when she called, like, _always._ She sent him a quick text and then tried calling again but still there was no answer. This time she left a message: “Hey, Asshole, where are you? You’re thirty minutes late to shift and Lincoln looks ready to kick your head in. Call me back. Or text me. Or show up to work. Or, hey, here’s a wild idea, do all three.” She hung up and then went back to reading her book, though she’d lost interest in it due to the budding anxiety that something was off.

Or maybe nothing was off. It was Valentine’s Day, after all, and the man _was_ a closet romantic, so maybe he made Emori, his girlfriend, breakfast in bed and then they had _such amazing sex_ (as he loved to call it). Or maybe he took her out to breakfast before she had to go into work. Maybe there was nothing wrong at all.

But he’d _never_ been late to work before—he took punctuality very seriously.

_But still._

So maybe…

“Let’s go!” Jasper shouted as he burst through the double doors.

“Where?” Miller questioned boredly, not making a move to push himself away from the table where he was enjoying his third cup of coffee.

“Tunnel collapse in downtown Chicago—“

Just as he said it the inner com clicked on.

_“Truck 31, Squad 4, Ambulance 61, tunnel collapse in downtown Chicago.”_

Miller got up, then, his coffee long forgotten. Raven and Monty followed after the two men, their hearts pounding already with nervousness. They quickly changed into their gear and climbed into Truck 31, where everyone else was waiting already. Miller took the driver’s seat and Lincoln took the passenger. Once the doors closed the sirens wailed and Miller slammed on the gas.

They were silent as they rode to the site. All fidgeting in their seats, looking out the windows and to each other, sharing the same concerned looks in their eyes. They were trained for this, of course they were, but they’d never seen it. Well, in the five years that Raven had been on the job she’d never seen it. She was ready, or at least she thought she was. There would be numerous casualties, of course, this she knew. People screaming. Burnt cars. Blood, blood, blood.

She was ready.

She was ready.

She could do this.

The truck pulled to a stop and everyone quickly got out to assess their surroundings. It was more than they could have ever thought; bodies laid out on tarps, some together, some torn apart. Cars crushed and mangled. Screaming. Pleas for help. Shouting orders. Seven fire trucks and ten ambulances were already on the scene. But it wouldn’t be enough. The tunnel was in shattered ruins in front of them and they would be digging people out of the wreckage well on into the night and possibly through the next morning. They would get to some too late, and they would get to some just in time. It was pick and choose. It was hell and they had entered it.

“Did you ever get in contact with Murphy?” Lincoln asked as he stepped beside Raven.

“No.” She shook her head, not looking away from the tragedy in front of her.

“He’s dead.” The man threatened through a clenched jaw and then left her side to go take orders from Anya, their Chief.

Raven finally shifted her eyes from the collapsed tunnel when she felt someone nudge her shoulder and wrap their pinky finger around hers. She looked to the side and saw her girlfriend. “It’ll be okay.” Octavia assured under her breath.

The dark haired woman nodded, took a deep breath, and then left to go join her Captain and the other firefighters to hear what the plan of action was. Octavia and Monty grabbed their gear and headed out into the wasteland with the hopes that they would save more lives than they would lose.

 

* * *

 

It took an hour for them to pull twenty people from the wreckage. Only five of the victims survived. It was enough for Raven to want to fall to her knees and scream. But she didn’t. She kept on, stayed on track, continued to work through all the muscle strains and aching limbs to try to save as many lives as she could.

It was another twenty minutes into digging when she heard Lexa gasp, _“Oh my god.”_

Raven stood from where she’d been momentarily resting and watched as the younger girl backed away from the car she’d just been looking into. She raised an eyebrow and began towards her. “What?” She questioned wearily, afraid of what the Candidate had found in the nearly flattened vehicle.

The tan girl turned to her, eyes wide and glossy, and said in a choked and frantic voice, “Raven, call Emori.” She froze. Lexa said more sternly, “Someone needs to call Emori.” Her heart stopped.

Raven shook her head in disbelief. “What are you— _why?_ ” She pushed around the woman and nearly fell to her knees at what she saw; a black Mazda, crushed and broken, and through the vacant back window she saw a man. He was pale and his face was covered in deep red gashes. His eyes were closed and it didn’t look like he was breathing. “Oh my…” Raven gasped quietly, holding her hand to her mouth as it hung in shock. Her eyes began to mist over and her nose began to tingle. _“Fuck.”_

She _was not_ ready.

She _could not_ do this.

 

* * *

 

He wasn’t dead.

_Not yet._

Raven sent Lexa to go get Octavia and Monty while she stayed and gawked at the mess in front of her. She wanted to cry. Wanted to curse the sky and damn the ground. Because it was _Murphy_ and Murphy was her best friend and now he was—he was alive but barely breathing and crushed in between his _car._

What were the hopes of getting him out?

As a firefighter she would say very, very slim.

As a hopeful and heartbroken friend she would say there was a possibility.

She wasn’t a doctor but she was dating a paramedic and her friends were all surgeons, so she had her fair share of medical knowledge—and she knew that if they lifted the hood of the car off of the man that he was going to bleed out. They weren’t close enough to the hospital, nowhere near, so even if they were able to pull off a miracle, survival wasn’t concrete.

Hopeless.

Sincerely hopeless.

“Staring isn’t going to fix me, Reyes.” A low and strangled voice came from the car. The woman’s heart skipped a beat and that time she did fall to her knees. She stuck her head in the opening, where she came at eye level with the man. He tried to smile. A pitiful, lopsided little thing, but a smile none-the-less.

“You’re awake.” She breathed in relief, doing her best to keep the rest of her tears locked in her eyes.

He tried to nod but instead just cringed. Then coughed up blood. “How pissed were Lincoln and Anya that I was late for work?”

She gave a choked laugh. “Pretty pissed.”

“Think this will earn me a vacation?” The question insinuated that he was going to live through this, but his tone of voice revealed that he knew much better than that, and Raven felt her heart breaking even more.

“Oh, yeah,” She agreed, biting her lip to hold in a sob as he began coughing up blood and chunks of something she didn’t want to know what they were. “This earns you a vacation to Maui for sure.”

He chuckled, a pathetic gargled thing. “I’ve always wanted to go there. I think Emori would like it.”

“She’d love it.” Raven agreed softly, wanting nothing more than to climb into the totaled car and wrap her body around him as some sort of protection and comfort. Being in the cold metal all alone, terrified and freezing, it was not what she wanted Murphy’s last memories to be.

But she couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

“Has someone called her?” The man asked once his fit of blood soaked coughing was over.

“Anya did—she’ll be here any minute.”

Octavia and Monty rushed up then, Octavia quickly nudging Raven out of the way so that she could get a good look at the situation, and Monty apologizing for taking so long.

Raven watched from behind her girlfriend, her hands moving quick and precise inside the car, though there wasn’t much she could do. It took all of three minutes before the tanned woman stood and turned to Raven with a sullen face and downcast eyes.

“There’s nothing.” Raven stated lowly.

Octavia nodded regretfully. “There’s a rod sticking through his stomach. One of his lungs has collapsed. He’s got _a lot_ of internal bleeding. And—from what I can see…” She trailed off and cleared the lump from her through before she went on. “From what I can _see_ his right arm is missing and there’s too much debris on his lower half—so I don’t even know if it’s still attached anymore. The only thing I can do is give him pain meds to make it…easier.” Her voice shifted from high to low with every few words, threatening to fall completely into sobs, but she forced herself to _stay calm._

It felt as if the wind had been knocked out of Raven. Her head spun in every direction. She stumbled back a little, only staying upright because someone grabbed her shoulders firmly from behind. When Raven turned she saw her Captain behind her, his face grim, his eyes vacant. Lincoln let go of her shoulders as soon as he realized that she wouldn’t pass out and then he went to the car and bent down in front of it. None of them could hear what he and Murphy were saying but Raven assumed that it was a goodbye.

 

* * *

 

 It took Emori thirty minutes to get there. Between in intense flow of trauma patients coming into Chicago General, where she was an ortho surgeon (the head of ortho, or, the _Ortho God_ as Murphy liked to flaunt), and the traffic backup all throughout the city, no one held it against her. Anya rushed her to where Murphy was trapped and when she saw her boyfriend, her beautiful, damaged boyfriend stuck between the car like a goddamn sandwich, she stumbled to her knees and fell to the hard cracked ground beside him.

“John, oh my— _John!_ ” She began to sob and then her voice grew hushed as the two of them spoke. She was a surgeon, she knew what was coming. She knew that…she knew. And knowing that she knew shattered Raven’s heart even more. Emori saw things like this all the time, sometimes worse things that this, so she knew the odds were not favorable. She _knew_ there was nothing they could do.

There was _nothing at all_ that they could do.

“He wants to talk to you.” Emori mumbled a few minutes later from behind Raven. She spun around to the woman, ending her conversation with Monty mid-sentence. Emori’s eyes were red and puffy, her nose pink and raw, her cheeks swollen from all the crying.

She nodded, squeezed Emori’s hand, and then walked over to the car. “Hey, how you doin?” She asked as she bent down and maneuvered herself so that she could see the man’s face.

“How do I look?” He asked.

She smirked. “Great.”

“Fucking liar.” Blood gushed out of his mouth but she didn’t point it out and he ignored it. Raven wanted nothing more than to pull him out of that car but it would have been useless. If anything it would have sped up his death. And she wanted him alive for as long as he could hold on. “Can I ask you to do something for me?” He questioned suddenly.

She nodded furiously. “Yeah, anything.”

“Hug me?” It wasn’t an odd question, given the circumstances. But there was no way she was going to be able to hug him since his body was…nearly flattened and cloaked in metal. Murphy extended his free arm towards her and she gingerly reached in and grabbed it, held it tightly. That was as close to a hug as they would get, and she would gladly accept it. “I need you to do something else for me.”

“Anything.”

He hesitated, coughed, then said, “Take care of Emori.” His voice broke as tears began to spill from his eyes. “She’s—she’s tough but she’s not going to be able to handle _this._ She’s going to need someone—she’s—she doesn’t need to be _alone._ ”

Raven nodded, squeezed his hand tightly. “She’s not going to be alone, Murphy.” She assured sternly. “I got her. _We_ got her. She’ll be okay.”

“She won’t.” He laughed bitterly, then softly, “But she will be. You’ll be okay, too.”

“I _hate_ you.” The woman muttered through a clenched jaw.

“I hate you, too.” He winked and smiled. “Could you get her for me?”

“Of course.”

After that, it only took twenty minutes for his heart to stop beating.

 

* * *

 

“I need you to do something for me.” Raven whispered later that night as she and Octavia held each other in bed.

“Anything.” Her girlfriend whispered back, tightening her grip around the woman.

Raven looked up at her, tears in her eyes. “Don’t fucking die.”

She couldn’t nod. She couldn’t say that she wouldn’t, that she would always be there. She couldn’t comfort Raven, couldn’t tell her that death, for her, was impossible, because it wasn’t. Death, for the both of them, was very possible. Every day, it was possible. Every hour they were in uniform on the streets—or even out of uniform, it was possible.

Death, for them, like everyone else, was the inevitable. They were not immortal because they wore a uniform and saved lives. They were not invincible because they went into burning buildings and fought odds much larger than themselves.

No, Octavia couldn’t promise that she wouldn’t die anymore than Raven could. But what she could do was hold her girlfriend and promise to always be there for her, so she did.

**Author's Note:**

> it's not a holiday writing challenge without me doing something tragic. ;D


End file.
